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Replanting the Rust Belt

The chef Jonathon Sawyer at the Greenhouse Tavern, in Cleveland.Credit
Jeff Swensen for The New York Times

Pittsburgh in springtime is an edible city.

Blossoms spangle the pear trees on the streets, the hills are covered with maples in leaf and vigorous spring greens like knotweed and dandelions push up through cracked asphalt.

“See that?” said Cavan Patterson, gesturing to a vast abandoned truck depot across from his foraging and food supply business on Butler Street, Wild Purveyors. “Japanese knotweed would grow like crazy there,” he said. “It seems to love vacant lots.”

Wild Purveyors’s knotweed (it tastes like asparagus but grassier), along with the first morels of the season, were on menus at Pittsburgh’s most ambitious restaurants that night.

Mr. Patterson, a former mortgage salesman, and his brother, Tom, who has degrees in horticulture and mycology from Penn State, never planned to make a living in the food world. But because of the flourishing restaurant scene here, they spend their days in the countryside gathering mushrooms and weeds, retrieving wheels of cheese from Amish farmhouse cellars and hauling saddles of goat literally from farm to table.

These cities of the Rust Belt, which edges around the Great Lakes from Buffalo to Detroit, are linked in many ways: by a shared history of industry, by a network of defunct canals and decaying railroads, and by thousands of acres of farmland.

Now, the region is linked by a group of educated, ambitious chefs who are building a new kind of network. Its scale is tiny compared with the steel and shipbuilding empires of the region’s past. But they are nonetheless convinced that an interdependent web of chefs, butchers, farmers, millers, bakers and brewers will help bring the local landscape back into balance.

To that end, they are cooking sustainably, supporting agriculture and raising families — all while making world-class food with a strong sense of place. One hundred and thirty miles northwest of Pittsburgh, in Cleveland, the chef Jonathon Sawyer has nudged along a transformation since he and his wife, Amelia, opened the Greenhouse Tavern in 2009. The imaginative, approachable, precisely flavored dishes he pulls off there have helped Cleveland make the transition from bratwurst and braciole to broccoli escabeche, duck zampone and Ohio-raised strip steaks with shallot mignonnette.

Mr. Sawyer lived and cooked in New York City for five years, working for the chef Charlie Palmer, before he and his wife decided to raise their children back in their hometown.

But he was determined that if he came back, it would be partly to help the city transcend its Rust Belt reputation.

“When I was young, Cleveland was famous as the place where the lake caught fire,” he said, referring to oily trash on the polluted Cuyahoga River that burned in 1969.

“I wasn’t going to let Cleveland be the Soviet Union of food: 10 years behind the action,” he said. So he took the action to Cleveland, following local pioneers like Michael Symon and Zack Bruell.

But bringing trendy food to Cleveland, as Mr. Sawyer did by opening Noodlecat, a ramen shop, in 2011, isn’t the real game. Convinced that the relationship between chefs and farmers is one of the keys to bringing the city and the region back to life, Mr. Sawyer has cooked and coaxed a new local food system into being.

It connects mushroom farms, bean gardens, Italian bakeries, Amish dairies, noodle makers, butchers and the basement and backyard of his own house. (One is full of fermenting vinegars; the other, of chickens that produce fresh eggs for the restaurant.)

“He forages for people,” said Chris Thaxton, an organic garlic farmer with her husband, Fred, in nearby Hudson who was one of Mr. Sawyer’s first suppliers.

At his restaurant, Mr. Sawyer acts as a career counselor and culinary educator as much as a chef; all the 60-plus staff members are listed by name on the menu, and he encourages them to pursue their own ventures.

Cooperation among chefs — not the competition that is the norm elsewhere — is central to a thriving food scene, he said. “These cities have to be places where people want to live and work after graduation, and one of the things they want is good food,” he said. “Otherwise, the brain drain to the coasts will just go on.”

Although nobody in this verdant region much likes the label “Rust Belt,” Mr. Sawyer has adopted “Rust Belt Revival” as shorthand for what he’s trying to do there. (It’s also a Twitter hashtag he uses often: #rustbeltrevival.)

He was nurturing that revival on a recent spring morning in the farmland south of Cleveland, tramping through fields, listening to experienced farmers and offering advice to new ones. Since 1999, the National Park Service has been fostering sustainable farming inside Cuyahoga Valley National Park. Through a program called Countryside Initiative, a dozen farms — most of them more than 100 years old — have been restored, then leased to people who are willing to live there and work the land sustainably.

Daniel Greenfield, who grows produce for the Greenhouse Tavern, has been farming there for seven years. In his past life, he was a teacher and has a Ph.D. in environmental education. “Now it stands for post hole digger,” he said ruefully, referring to the fences he spends much of his time on, fending off predators from his alluring blueberry bushes.

But with steady demand from chefs and the 100 members of the farm’s Community Supported Agriculture program, Greenfield Berry Farm has proved that a small farm can support a family and also a big-city restaurant.

At the next stop, Mark Trapp had just begun turning over the soil on his brand-new farm, driving a team of draft horses that he bought from a nearby Amish family. (The numerous Amish communities in the region are a resource for newcomers who want to reintroduce traditional farming methods here.) He plans to grow grains like spelt and farro alongside more traditional crops like onions and beets. Between the rows, spikes of a thick weed called hog cress poked up. “We pay $5 a pound for that at the restaurant,” Mr. Sawyer said encouragingly. “But don’t wait too long, because it turns bitter in the heat.”

Mr. Trapp’s partner, Emily Stefanak, who commutes from the farm to her job as a registered nurse in Cleveland, showed off a lively litter of 6-week-old Tamworth piglets. “They’re being hams for you,” she said to Mr. Sawyer as they climbed over each other to stick their snouts into his broad palms.

“Yes,” he said, smiling. “And soon they’ll be hams for you.”

Chefs and farmers say that Ohio and Pennsylvania share high state and popular support for new farms. The Ohio Ecological Food and Farm Association and Cleveland’s farmers’ markets are robust partners for chefs. And the huge annual meeting of the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture is one of the few events that brings experienced Amish farmers and new “English” farmers together. “That’s what they call us at the conference,” Cavan Patterson said.

Mr. Patterson is more than a purveyor; he is a one-man hub of information, encouragement and ingredients for Pittsburgh’s new farm-to-table chefs. Traditionally, the city’s claims to food fame were the pierogi and Primanti Bros., makers of mouth-stretching Italian sandwiches. “Ten years ago, if you ordered a salad in this city, it came with French fries in it,” he said.

Pittsburgh has come a long way.

“If you had told me 10 years ago that I could open a restaurant in this city without a steak on the menu, I wouldn’t have believed it,” said Trevett Hooper, the chef and owner of Legume in the Oakland neighborhood. Stinging nettle pesto, dandelion greens, and — yes — pierogi, topped with house-made kimchi and sausage were on the menu in late April.

Mr. Hooper is a leader in sustainable, seasonal cooking here, but he is not alone. The nose-to-tail chef Justin Severino is making revolutionary salumi like Negroni-flavored dry sausage (with juniper, Campari and blood orange zest) and molasses-cured ham with ginger. Kevin Sousa, a chef with a molecular bent who is also a Pittsburgh native, has opened four restaurants here in three years and is headed next to Braddock, a former mill town a few miles farther along the Monongahela that has lost 90 percent of its population since the 1920s.

For chefs like Mr. Hooper and Mr. Sawyer, using local food year-round is more than a trend-driven experiment; it is a way to rebuild the region. Building an economically and environmentally sustainable food system from scratch seems ambitious for a restaurant kitchen, but these chefs put boundless energy and study into the project, one dish at a time.

In September, the local corn Mr. Hooper can buy is juicy and sweet; in February, once the cobs have been dried, he grinds kernels into fragrant polenta. He learned how to treat the dried kernels with slaked lime (calcium hydroxide) so that in April, the corn can be transformed again — into hominy for a goat pozole. (He also makes tempeh from scratch, with local soybeans and spores he orders online.)

“The question is always: How can we use something we have, that was grown by someone we know, in a different and delicious way?” he said.

To serve this kind of food, a restaurant needs customers who understand the realities of cooking seasonally and locally. “It isn’t always pretty,” he said. Spring was in the air that night, but local asparagus was still a month away. “I’m not going to serve asparagus, but what do I say: ‘Instead, have this bok choy that’s been fermenting for six months?’ ”

Mr. Sawyer’s favorite way of extending the life of local food is a vast vinegar experiment, using wine dregs from the restaurant, beer brands abandoned by local distributors and whatever else he decides to pour in, like garlic, soy sauce or apple cider. There are salty ones and herbal ones, funky ones and sweet ones that make lovely cocktails.

“It’s partly to wean ourselves off lemons and limes,” he said, pointing out that citrus fruits are relatively recent arrivals in the region’s kitchens; traditional cooks achieved tartness in other ways. “But mostly because it’s fun.”

Correction: May 22, 2013

An article on May 8 about food in the Rust Belt described incorrectly the location of Braddock, Pa., a town on the Monongahela River where Kevin Sousa plans to open a restaurant. It is upriver from Pittsburgh, not downriver. (The Monongahela empties into the Ohio River at Pittsburgh.)